RUSSIA SENDS RESUPPLY SHIP TO COLONY ON MARS

November 9 2011

Moscow, Russia – There was a time when there were only two games in town when it came to space exploration. Those early days of travel into the Heavens are certainly long gone now with multiple countries and even corporations sending people into space, but still those two original countries continue to dominate much of space exploration.

Despite all that new competition, though, the United States and Russia are still the strongest and most capable of space explorers. The years of experience, the maturity of their space program, and the sheer financial resources of the two nations means that they will likely continue to dominate the space race for many years to come, especially if they keep pushing forward just as Russia appears to have been doing for years.

Mars has long been a target for space exploration, given its similarities to Earth and its connection to our collective consciousness. Thus far, though, no manned missions have ever made it to the red planet, or so we had believed. On Tuesday, Russian space officials launched a new vessel to Mars, their first in 15 years, with the intention of taking charge of the red planet once and for all this time.

“This is great victory for Russia. This is great day,” said a spokesperson for the Russian space agency. “Roscosmos is great thing for Russia and soon will take control of Mars once and for all. This is great victory for Russia. Russia is back to Mars and this time we will stay.”

The Russian program had previously launched vessels to the planet, 17 in total, but all had been declared failures, at least officially.

Roscosmos is reportedly not carrying any human personnel, only equipment. It’s not clear if that equipment will be used by Russian personnel already on the planet.

“It will be interesting to see how this goes, how life has been on Mars all this time. Fifteen years is a long time to wait for resupply on planet with no real resources. Hopefully the people there are alright, that they have been able to survive somehow,” said Scrape TV Science analyst Dr. Howard Poe. “One also has to hope that they have not gone off the deep end, not sort of descended into anarchy or developed their own unique culture that will inevitably be hostile towards Earthers. That won’t help the cause of future exploration of Mars one bit.”

It’s not clear if Russia has sent other vessels to the planet in secret, only acknowledging the ones that they got caught sending.

“If they are okay, if they are still human and presumably not desiccated corpses, it will speak well to future exploration of Mars, at least by Russians. They are a tough bunch of people,” continued Poe. “It would be great to have a human colony, a healthy one, already on the planet. It would make things much easier going forward for future exploration, assuming of course that the Russians would even allow that. It is a big planet, but still...”